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(Video) David Silvers, Florida Senate District 26: Eight Years Of Getting Things Done In The Minority

Writer: Indivisible Boca Raton
Indivisible Boca Raton
1 day ago
8 min read

Updated: 4 hours ago

Former State Rep. David Silvers, the Democrat running to replace Sen. Lori Berman in Florida Senate District 26, tells us how a six-year-old in handcuffs changed the course of his career




David Silvers started with a confession. When Congresswoman Lois Frankel visited us a few months ago, she spent part of her time telling her origin story, and Silvers figured that if someone who has served in Congress for years still has to introduce herself, nobody in the room was going to know him either. So he told us his. He was born in Miami Beach, and his parents divorced when he was one. From age five until fifteen he was largely raised by his grandfather, a Navy destroyer commander and Silver Star recipient, and Silvers described those years as something close to boot camp. His wife tells him he does not need to make the bed, but he does it anyway. “I have to make my bed every day,” he said.


He went to the University of Florida as an economics major and signed up for an American history class with Professor Julian Pleasants mostly because he loved history. The reading list pulled him toward public service, and at the end of the semester he could not wait to tell his grandfather he wanted to run for office. His grandfather shot the idea down. Silvers called him his idol, but said he wanted to blaze his own trail, and he went on to earn a law degree and an MBA at the University of Miami.


After graduate school, Silvers helped grow a small cable system in Port St. Lucie from five employees to 50 between 2005 and 2008, filling in as CFO and head of programming without training for either position. The company recruited heavily from out of state, in the winter, which he admitted helped. Every out-of-state candidate said some version of the same thing: they loved the beaches, the weather, and the lack of a state income tax, but they would not move their families unless the company paid for private school. “It was like a kick in the gut,” he said. He had been born and educated in Florida, and that was the moment he decided he wanted to be a champion for public education in his home state.


His first campaign, against incumbent Republican Bill Hager in 2014, ended in a loss, 47.5 percent to 52.5 percent. Millions of dollars were spent against him, and the attacks went after his family. “It was rough,” he told us, and he was candid that it left him with something like PTSD. His fiancée at the time, now his wife, told him the decision was his but that she would back him if he wanted to try again. He did, won in 2016, and served four terms in the Florida House until term limits ended his run in 2024.



A Six-Year-Old In Handcuffs

A month and a half after Silvers was first elected, his sister, a clinical psychologist, handed him a BuzzFeed story about a six-year-old boy in Jacksonville. The boy had known behavioral health issues, but the school did not follow its own protocol, and he ended up in handcuffs in the back of a squad car, sent for an involuntary mental health examination under the Baker Act. He spent 26 hours in solitary confinement before he saw a provider and five days in the facility, well past the three-day limit. When he came out he was catatonic, with what may have been a broken nose and scratches on his face. His sister’s message was simple: you have been elected, so do something about it.


Silvers told us he is no clinician, but in his first session he filed a bill requiring receiving facilities to begin examining a minor within 12 hours of arrival. Providers wanted 24 or 36 hours. He opened at six and settled at 12, and he admits 12 is still too long. The part with real teeth was a statewide task force to study how the Baker Act was being used on children, especially by schools, and both provisions became law that year through a companion bill. The numbers explain why. More than 32,000 children were sent for Baker Act examinations in the 2015-16 fiscal year, according to WUSF, close to a 50 percent jump in five years. “It’s such a horrific experience for an adult, let alone a child,” Silvers said.


He went on to pass seven Baker Act reform bills. One of them sounds small but says a lot about how Tallahassee works: the handbook that police officers and medical professionals rely on had gone nearly a decade without an update while lawmakers changed the Baker Act every year, so Silvers passed a law requiring the Department of Children and Families to update it annually. He came to the Legislature wanting to be an education champion, he joked, and now he guesses he is a mental health advocate too.


The Death of Andrew Coffey

In 2017, FSU fraternity pledge Andrew Coffey died of alcohol poisoning at a party. Everyone around him was under 21, and instead of calling for help, they put him in a room to sleep it off because they were afraid of being arrested for underage drinking. Florida’s 2012 Good Samaritan law protected people who called for help during a drug overdose but said nothing about alcohol, so the Board of Governors that oversees the state university system asked Silvers to carry a fix. You would think a bill like that would sail through, and in the Senate it did, but the incoming House speaker, then a committee chair, refused to hear it, telling Silvers it would promote underage drinking. Silvers told him college kids are going to drink regardless and that this bill could save a kid’s life. The Board of Governors finally met with the chair themselves, he relented, and Gov. DeSantis signed HB 595 in 2019. Afterward, Silvers traveled to universities around the state to make sure students knew they could call for help without getting arrested.


Protecting Seniors’ Savings

In his last session, Silvers sponsored the House version of a law that lets banks pause transactions when they suspect an elderly or vulnerable customer is being financially exploited. Before it passed, he said, banks were so afraid of lawsuits that they let suspicious transactions go through. The AARP and the Florida Sheriffs Association brought the issue to him because scams targeting seniors had become a serious problem across South Florida. The law took effect January 1, 2025 and allows banks to delay a transaction for up to 15 business days, with extensions if an investigation supports it. At a candidate forum before the primary, a woman came up to thank him. Her husband had nearly wiped out their savings, and the bank caught it and paused the transaction in time.



How A Democrat Gets Bills Passed In Tallahassee

Being in the minority means working with the other side, Silvers said, but it also means treating staff with respect, especially the policy chiefs of committees like Health and Human Services and Commerce, where so much legislation has to pass. House members are limited to six bills a session while senators have no cap, so when one of his priorities needed a Senate sponsor, he often did the legwork himself, meeting with Senate committee chairs, vice chairs, members, and staff. Those relationships are already paying off. At the opening of this year’s session, House policy chiefs asked what he was up to, and when he told them he was running for the Senate, they asked to work on legislation together. He already knows what his first Senate bill will be, a behavioral health measure. Walking onto the House floor, he said, “was an honor and not a right,” and he worries that too many people in office see it the other way around. He also has a four-and-a-half-year-old daughter, and she is a big part of why he wants to keep going.


Amendment 3, ICE Detention, And Your Insurance Bill

When an attendee asked about affordability, ICE, and the property tax amendment, Silvers took the questions one at a time. He is not a proponent of Amendment 3. Nobody wants to pay more taxes, he said, but passing it now and figuring out the consequences later is a public safety risk, and he pointed to the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office freezing hires. Florida keeps growing, and cutting budgets means more people calling for police, fire, and ambulances with fewer people available to answer. His family had to call 911 for a relative about six months ago, and he wondered out loud how much longer that response would take a year or two from now.


On immigration, he told us about a close family friend from Venezuela who has lived in Palm Beach County for 20 years under Temporary Protected Status, works, pays taxes, and has never committed a crime. While driving his 19-year-old son to American University in Washington, D.C., the two were stopped near Sarasota, and both are now being held in Duval County with a court date that is not until next July. Only their attorney can talk to them. Silvers has reached out to members of Congress and the Legislature to try to help, and he said the man’s only offense is being here under TPS.


On insurance, he said the Legislature has not done nearly enough. He wants insurers that write windstorm coverage in other states, and sell every other type of insurance in Florida, to be required to write windstorm policies here too. He is encouraged that Citizens Property Insurance, created as the insurer of last resort, has dropped from about 1.4 million policies to roughly 300,000, but coverage is still too expensive, and he urged homeowners to shop their policies through a broker. The Republican answer, he said, is to deregulate everything, and that does not help.


“Failure Factories”

A retired pediatrician asked what he would do about Florida’s public schools. Silvers remembered his first session, when he heard colleagues call public schools “failure factories.” “I thought it was disgusting,” he said. As he tells it, Govs. Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis each slashed per-pupil funding when they took office, raised it slowly over their terms, and then took credit for the increase, which he compared to a Ponzi scheme. In his view the fix starts with funding and getting resources to teachers. In his second year in the House, he passed a bill letting high school students earn credit toward graduation through pre-apprenticeship programs, aimed at kids who cannot afford college or do not want to go, so they stay in school and graduate ready to work. The Classroom Teachers Association has endorsed him, and he says he has always kept an open door. “I know what I know, and I know what I don’t know,” he said, and he leans on teachers and other institutions to fill the gaps.


Why We Are Supporting David Silvers

Near the end of the evening, a woman who once worked as a mental health attorney for the New York State Attorney General’s office stood up to tell Silvers he had her vote, adding that he had shown one person really can make a difference. Senate District 26, which stretches from Boca Raton west to Belle Glade, is open because Sen. Lori Berman is term-limited, and Silvers faces Republican Rick Roth, his former House colleague, who is endorsed by Donald Trump. Holding this seat matters if Democrats are ever going to break the Republican supermajority in Tallahassee. Silvers spent eight years in the House minority getting laws passed anyway, and we want to see what he can do in the Senate. Vote early, return your mail ballot by November 3, and if you live in District 26, take his request to heart. “I hope you don’t forget me when you go vote,” he told us.


Support David Silvers for Florida Senate District 26:


This article comes from the Indivisible Boca Raton Media Team. We cover candidate forums, local government, and the fights that matter to Palm Beach County. Subscribe on Substack and follow us on YouTube so you never miss a story.





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